It has long been known to expose wood and bamboo grain for decorative purposes. Indeed, flooring, walls (paneling) and even furniture including such things as tables, desks, etc., often display wood grain for decorative purposes. The wood grain provides a nice texture and design to the surface of the decorative wood product. Sometimes, the effect of wood grain is obtained through the use of veneers which can be arranged and manipulated to present wood grain designs.
It is also known that the end grain of wood presents a nice design and provides a very resilient surface that makes it desirable for use in flooring. Numerous previous patents disclose methods, and products made by such methods, for creating decorative wood products that feature wood grain.
It has also been known, in the past, to utilize materials other than natural wood products to create floors and other decorative or useful products from other natural materials and from synthetic materials. However, oftentimes, synthetic materials cannot provide the warmth, texture or richness of wood products. Although efforts may be made to attempt to infuse “wood” characteristics into a synthetic material, such efforts heretofore have not been generally successful. It is also known that structural wood products can be engineered effectively for use as structural components such as for the core of doors. Engineered structural wood products are also known as “structural composite lumber” or “SCL.” One such engineered structural wood product is manufactured and sold by Weyerhaeuser under the trademark TimberStrand. TimberStrand™ is made by using trees from species of Aspen and Poplar, cleaning and debarking the trees and cutting the cleaned and debarked trees into strands up to twelve inches long, drying the strands and coating the strands with a formaldehyde-free adhesive. The coated strands are then aligned parallel to each other to take advantage of the natural strength of the wood and passed through a steam injection pressing process which laminates the strands into solid billets of wood up to four and a half inches thick. The billets can then be cut to specification. Some primary known uses for such engineered wood product are studs, joists, headers and rim board in conventional building framing, and as a structural composite lumber substrate for use in the core of wood doors, because it combines the screw holding and bending properties of lumber with the engineered stability of a particleboard core. One benefit of this structural wood product is that small trees can be used and the demand is lessened for harvesting trees from valued and protected old growth forests. However, one drawback with the engineered lumber is that it is not decorative as formed, i.e. the faces of the finished product are not decorative.
The teachings of U.S. Pat. No. 6,428,871, incorporated by reference herein, however, show that such a structural wood product can be processed to expose a decorative edge grain.
It is known that bamboo has many decorative and structural uses. One benefit of using bamboo is its fast growth and regenerative properties. It is known in the art to produce bamboo products by creating “laminated bars.” Raw bamboo is split into pieces, sliced into rectangular form according to the usable thickness of the culn wall, dried, immersed or otherwise coated in a binder material, laminated together, and cemented into section bars after subjecting the laminated slices to heat under pressure. One limitation of this method is that substantial material is wasted, since arc-like sections of bamboo can only be sliced into rectangular pieces. By using one layer of rectangular pieces, the resulting section bars are subject to warping, since the bamboo will bend when infused with moisture. In such circumstances, the bamboo section bar can come unglued and split. To overcome these limitations, bamboo has been “threaded” or cut up into thin threads and the threads are glued and adhered together under pressure. One such method is described in Chinese Patent Application No. 99117809.2 entitled “Method of Reconstructing and Reinforcing Bamboo into Section Bar” (hereinafter “the Chinese Patent”), also incorporated by reference herein. However, it can be argued that the resulting section bars are not distinctly decorative, since compressed bars made from threads of bamboo do not demonstrate any edge grain that is any different than the bar surface itself.
What would be desired, but has not yet heretofore been developed, is a decorative engineered bamboo strand edge grain product and method of manufacturing.